Germany-Switzerland Train Tour

This August we embarked on a train tour across Germany and Switzerland, visiting a different city every day. Our route was: Düsseldorf – Köln – Koblenz – Heidelberg – Freiburg – Luzern – Interlaken – Bern – Zürich – Stuttgart – back to Düsseldorf

We chose the cities so that each train journey was around one hour. Every afternoon, we traveled to a new city, rested at the hotel, took an evening walk, ate dinner, then the next morning had breakfast, checked out while leaving our baggage at the hotel, explored the city for a couple of hours, picked up our luggage, and continued on to the next city.

Booking Trains and Hotels

We had secured our train tickets and hotel bookings as early as April. It is not critical for train tickets because you will always find a train with paying around 20% more if you buy on the day of your journey. Buying individual tickets for each route was much cheaper than buying a Eurail Pass. Hotels must be booked in advance, otherwise you won't be able to find a room.

The entire process was digital. To buy train tickeds, we used DB Navigator, bahn.de, Omio for Germany and SBB for Switzerland to buy train tickets. You don’t need a physical ticket to board—just show the QR code to the ticket inspector after finding a seat. Seats usually display their reservation status on a small LCD screen next to them. If you don’t have a reservation, simply choose a seat that isn’t reserved.

We used Booking.com for hotel bookings, making sure our hotels were within 15 minutes walking distance of of train stations. We complemented our city explorations with walking routes from the GPSmyCity app (20 USD/year).

Trains

• German ICE trains were fast, comfortable, with free WiFi and quiet 1st class cars.

• Note that sometimes they change the train platform/track number ("Gleis" in German). Pay attention to the screens and announcements. In the below picture, the platform of our train has been changed from 5 to 4:

• Swiss regional trains were slow and more scenic, but 2nd class trains typically lacked WiFi. Even station WiFi required SMS verification—which didn’t accept Turkish numbers. That left us dependent on hotel WiFi unless we wanted to pay roaming fees.

• Trains generally ran within 10 minutes of their scheduled time.

• Seat reservations cost 7 euros per person, but if you travel outside rush hours, they’re unnecessary, there are plenty of empty seats.

One of the trip’s strongest impressions was how deeply rail networks shape daily life in these countries. Every town is linked by trains running at 150 km/h or more. This creates not just convenience for travelers, but also massive employment opportunities for technicians, engineers, and operators who maintain and innovate these networks.

As the saying goes: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation." For a deeper dive into this idea, I recommend the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes.

Practical Travel Notes

• We were always able to pay by credit card. Only once did my card not work in a grocery store, and I had to pay in cash. Having 200 euros in cash will be more than enough.

• Breakfast: Hotel breakfasts average 20 euros per person. Since we had modest breakfast needs, we skipped them, preparing our own breakfast. A nice side benefit was that we didn’t have to conform to the hotel’s breakfast hours and each member of our family could sleep as much as they wanted. Grocery chains like REWE, Lidl in Germany and Coop in Switzerland became our go-to spots. Here is our typical breakfast:

• In Switzerland, our egg cooker required a Euro-to-Swiss (Type J) adapter because it had thick pins, while Swiss electrical outlets are designed for thin ones:

• Tap water: Safe and free everywhere.

• Weather: It was a pleasant 25 °C on August 4, but by August 11 a heat wave had reached Germany and Switzerland, with temperatures rising to 35 °C, making walking exhausting. It lasted for a week and subsided just as we returned. Locals said this happens only once a year, and we were a little unlucky to catch it.

Music: Sia - Cheap Trills

The Teenage Attention Crisis

A friend of mine asked me for advice on how to help his 17-year-old son overcome his gaming and video addiction. Short-form social media videos and online games are designed to be addictive. Having been a former StarCraft addict and now the father of a 13-year-old boy, I know firsthand that nothing compares to the thrill of online gaming.

The problem is, these activities don’t just eat up time — they erode attention span. Games and TikTok-style videos constantly reward the brain with quick hits of dopamine. You get instant excitement, instant novelty, instant feedback. Over time, this rewires the brain to expect stimulation every few seconds.

It is not an issue when the child is less than 7 years old and a tablet is a parent's best friend. As the child starts school, it makes it difficult to sit through a class, read a book, or even watch a movie without reaching for a phone. The mind starts craving constant action. Anything slower feels boring, even if it’s meaningful.

This is why expecting teenagers to “just stop” is unrealistic. No matter how fun or beneficial the alternatives may be, those alternatives can’t compete with the rapid-fire dopamine loops of gaming and social media.

And here’s the key point: it’s not about a lack of awareness. Teens know they should be studying, playing sports, or sleeping earlier. The issue is willpower — and when your brain has been trained to chase fast rewards, willpower alone isn’t enough.

So talking them into it rarely works, and even then only for a few days at most. The only reliable way is to restrict access: put the phone away, turn off the computer. Of course, they will get bored. But boredom is valuable because it pushes you to be creative, to explore, to come up with something new. If the phone is always there to fill every empty moment, the brain never learns how to generate its own entertainment or ideas.

For parents, holding the line is hard because kids will push back, they’ll get angry, and they’ll try to negotiate their way around the rules. We use Google Family Link to limit his mobile phone time and app access. During school semester, he’s allowed to use his computer only on weekends, for up to three hours per day. When he breaks the rules by secretly giving himself more time on his mother’s phone or by exceeding the three-hour computer limit, we take away his phone and computer for a couple of days. Before and during exam weeks, he also goes on a digital detox, meaning the phone and computer are completely put away for 2 weeks.

Music: Stromae - Papaoutai